Jewish feasts

The Character of Jewish Feasts in Biblical Worship

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The three major Jewish feasts are associated with three annual harvests; historically each involved the return of a portion of the harvest to the Lord. These offerings symbolized the reasons for the feast itself: God is the source of the fruits of the earth; God’s gifts of produce are for the sustenance and comfort of the people; and because God gives freely, the worshipers must do the same, sharing their benefits with the needy.

The three principal Jewish feasts (Passover, Pentecost, and Booths) had an agricultural origin, and their meaning as such did not differ greatly from the meaning of “feast” as just described. The three feasts were connected with the most important harvests in the three productive seasons of the year, and they expressed the deep joy of a people that was led and nourished by its God. Passover celebrated the barley harvest in the spring, Pentecost the wheat harvest in the summer, and Booths the fruit harvest in the fall. In keeping with an almost universally known and attested religious custom, the heart of each feast consisted in the offering of part of the harvest to the divinity. The book of Deuteronomy makes explicit reference to this practice in the cases of Pentecost and Booths, two feasts that, unlike Passover, which has been reread and historicized to a greater degree, allow us to glimpse their original agricultural basis:

Celebrate the Feast of Weeks [Pentecost] to the Lord your God by giving a freewill offering in proportion to the blessings the Lord your God has given you.… Celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles for seven days after you have gathered the produce of your threshing floor and your winepress.… No man should appear before the Lord empty-handed: Each of you must bring a gift in proportion to the way the Lord your God has blessed you. (Deut. 16:10, 13, 16–17)

What is the meaning of such an offering, which is both the expression and the basis of feasts and their joy? To offer God the produce of the earth is not an act of self-deprivation (renouncing something in order to give it to God) but is an act of self-definition and acknowledgment that the fruits of the earth belong to the Lord and that human beings may use them only as his beneficiaries. This simple action sums up in a symbolic way three basic concepts and attitudes: (1) the produce gathered belongs to God, who is its master and owner; (2) the produce is given as a gift to meet the needs of and to comfort humans; and (3) the fruits of the earth are to be enjoyed not according to the logic of possession and hoarding but according to the divine intention that brings them into existence.

When Israel offered to the Lord part of its harvests in the three important seasons of the year, it was reaffirming this pattern of conviction and choice. Israel professed its belief that the “bread” and “wine” of the Promised Land were not the result of the people’s efforts or of magical practices, but were due to the creative goodwill of God, and Israel renewed its commitment to share these things with others. This accounts for the biblical insistence that on these festival days no one should be in want but all should have and fully enjoy: “Be joyful at your Feast—you, your sons and daughters, your menservants and maidservants, and the Levites, the aliens, the fatherless and the widows who live in your towns” (Deut. 16:14). This emphasis on feeding the poor reflects a theological rather than a sociological concern: God intends the fruits of the earth for the enjoyment of all; if the poor, as well as the rich, enjoy them, God’s reign is being brought to pass, and his will is being fulfilled in a concrete way.

Sharing the fruits of the earth is not simply an imperative of social ethics, but is the very heart of the theological directive: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deut. 6:5); here, to “love the Lord” means to obey his will by accepting and doing it within history.

The sacrifice of animals, which had a privileged place in the worship offered in the Jerusalem temple, had at bottom the same twofold meaning as the offering of firstfruits: it was an acknowledgment of God’s lordship over the animal world and a readiness to take nourishment from that world in a spirit of sharing and not of hoarding, that is, as gifts intended for all and not as a privilege of a few.

Israel derived the three agricultural feasts from the surrounding Semitic world. However, it did not make them its own in a purely passive way; it turned them into original creations by enriching them with its own specific spiritual outlook. The name usually given to this process of reinterpretation is “historicization.” By this is meant that the focus of the feast was shifted from events of the natural world to special historical events: the deliverance from Egypt in the Feast of Passover, the gift of the Torah in the Feast of Pentecost, and the enjoyment of the Torah’s fruits in the Feast of Booths.

It is true that Israel “historicized” the agricultural feasts. It is necessary, however, to understand this process correctly: the process took the form not of contrasting the new with the old or ignoring the old, but of further explaining the original meaning and reaching down to its root.

The central event of Jewish history is the Exodus from slavery in Egypt, a single action with three stages: departure from Egypt, the gift of the Torah (or covenant), and entrance into the Promised Land. Israel was liberated from slavery and brought into the “good and spacious land” of Canaan, but the entrance was neither automatic nor taken for granted, for between departure and entrance was Mount Sinai, the place of the covenant where the Torah was offered and accepted. Here is the epicenter and secret of all Jewish history and Jewish originality: the discovery that the land, their own land, would produce “milk and honey” in abundance (Exod. 3:8, 17; Num. 13:27; Deut. 6:3; 11:9), not spontaneously, however, but only if and to the extent that Israel would be faithful to the covenant. This connection between the fertility of the soil and obedience to the Torah is clearly expressed in Leviticus 26:3–6, which is bewildering because the fruits of which it speaks are not the fruits of some special world but the normal production of the trees of any part of our world. Yet if these fruits are truly to bring joy to all and become a sign of communion instead of destruction, a precise, divine condition must be met: they must be cultivated and eaten according to the logic of the covenant, that is, Jews must acknowledge them to be gifts and must consent to their universal destination.

This “historicity” is peculiar to the Jewish situation, but clearly, it does not contradict the meaning of “feast”; rather, it further clarifies that meaning by getting to the root of one of its fundamental aspects. When early human beings offered God part of their seasonal produce, they were recognizing his fatherhood and accepting the produce as his gift. Israel accepted this logic but had a better grasp of its dynamic and its requirement. It realized that if the fruits of the earth are truly to be a gift and a blessing, it is not enough simply to accept them; rather they must be shared through a way of life-based on justice and responsibility. Justice and the fruitfulness of the land are partners in an “indissoluble marriage” in which the two shed light on one another. Israel’s originality lies in its having transcended a purely “natural” view of nature and having connected the abundance of the land’s fruits with its own free choices.

The Purpose of Jewish Feasts in Biblical Worship

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A feast celebrates the positive character of existence. In the face of evil and pain, feasts proclaim the goodness of creation and the freedom to enjoy the world because God made it.

A feast is a statement that the world is a good place because human beings can enjoy it and because God made it. Unwittingly, and prior to any reflection on the point, the celebrants of a feast relate their activity to independent but interrelated poles: human beings, the world, and God — human beings as subjects who are good, the world as an object that is good, and the divinity as the foundation of the two goodnesses. A feast brings out the fact that the world is good and human beings can dwell in it as their native place because it is willed by and founded on the sacred. Here is the heart and secret of every feast; in the celebration of a feast, we reappropriate, beyond and despite appearance, the positive character of existence as a space filled with fruition and making.

Feasts As Rejection of the Negative

As an interpretation of meaning, a feast can be seen as having three moments or phases. First, it is a rejection of negativity and death. The lives of individuals and groups are marked by pain and privation, poverty and injustices, violence and absurdity. Instead of displaying the original harmony, life seems to be under a constant threat that frustrates all efforts and undertakings. Instead of being drawn by a beneficent telos (purpose), it seems driven by a maleficent demon that has donned the hands and eyes of thanatos, or death. A feast represents a suspension of this entire order of things, a profession of faith that this world, in its present form, is not the true world (kosmos) but is negation (chaos) or counterfeit; it is not a home for human beings but an unrewarding wilderness. A feast challenges the primacy of evil and its claim to be ultimate reality; it is a rebellion against evil’s perverse power and its claim to have the final say; it is a sign—that turns into a certainty—that evil can be dethroned and overcome. Therefore feasts are the greatest wealth of a people, especially the poorest among them, for feasts with their myths and rites preserve in concentrated form the most fruitful seeds of hope and struggle that human history contains. As long as people are able to celebrate feasts, they will also be capable of life and commitment.

Feasts As Rejoicing and Sharing

Second, a feast asserts the quality of life and defines its positive side. But what is this “quality” that a feast expresses, not conceptually but in a concrete, corporeal way? Many terms are used to describe this quality, but one seems especially important: you. “You shall rejoice in your feast” (Deut. 16:14 NASB). But the rejoicing here is something other than what is usually understood by the term in our affluent societies. The passage in Deuteronomy continues: “ … you and your son and your daughter and your male and female servants and the Levite and the stranger and the orphan and the widow who are in your towns.” Rabbi Elie Munk comments on this passage as follows:

People should eat meat and drink wine because it is these things, especially that contribute to their gladness. But when we eat and drink, it is our duty to provide the necessities for the foreigner, the widow, and the orphan, that is, for all who are in need. Those who double-lock their doors and eat only with their own families, without helping the unfortunate, will not experience the joy of the mitzvah but “only the satisfaction is given by their meal.” This is why the prophet Hosea [Hos. 9:4 rsv] says: “They shall not please him with their sacrifices. Their bread shall be like mourners’ bread; all who eat of it shall be defiled; for their bread shall be for their hunger only.” (E. Munk, Le monde des prières [1970], 295)

This passage summarizes the two basic aspects of the joy a feast proclaims and bestows: the enjoyment of things (“eating and drinking”) and fraternal sharing (“providing the necessities for the foreigner”). Instead of understanding joy in a purely psychological or pseudospiritual way, a feast emphasizes its corporeal element and its necessary connection with the fruits of the earth; instead of making this joy something self-centered, a feast asserts its comprehensive and nonexclusive character. True joy is born of two encounters: with the fruits of the earth and with our brothers and sisters. Where one of these two is missing, a feast changes from being an end to being a means; it ceases to be an expression of life and becomes a means of obtaining satisfaction. The joy proper to feast is, in reality, the plenitude of being that is in harmony with the things of this world and with this world’s inhabitants; it is the fruit produced by a recovered Eden, in which the original Adam and Eve, representatives of men and women of every age, live reconciled with each other, with the garden, and with God.

Feasts As Affirmation of a Higher Order

The third and most important aspect of a feast is that it is an assertion of that which is the ontological foundation of the goodness and meaning of the human person. Are the rebellion against the power of evil and the proclamation of the victory of the positive over the negative simply an expression of impotent and deceptive desire, or are they an echo of the truth that conquers falsehood and triumphs over self-deception? A feast reveals its full depth when understood as the assertion of the second alternative: human life has meaning, beyond all its historical failures and despite all its privations, not because it is subjectively given meaning by each individual, but because it is objectively founded by and on the sacred.

A feast thus asserts the existence of meaning and at the same time sets the conditions for the attainment of this meaning, meaning that grows and flourishes because it is located within a different horizon—the horizon of the divine, the sacred—which transcends that of the profane. By means of its mythical narratives and re-actualizing rites, a feast calls to mind and makes present again this foundational root; by returning to this root, human behavior overcomes fragmentation, conquering chaos and recovering kosmos, that is, order, strength, motivation, the human ideal. A feast indeed abolishes the established order (we need think only of the violations of standard norms that are to be seen in every feast), but it does so not for the sake of libertinism and chaos but in obedience to a higher order that is closer and more faithful to the divine intention. A feast overturns the world and re-creates it according to the divine model.

An Introduction to Jewish Feasts in Biblical Worship

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A feast is a sign of the divine in history. Israel celebrated three kinds of feasts: pilgrimage feasts, solemn or repentance feasts, and lesser feasts not mandated by the Torah. All of these commemorated God’s action in the life and history of the community.

Like all peoples and all religions, Israel introduces rhythms into the cycle of time by means of recurring feasts. These include feasts in the full and proper sense, the “pilgrimage feasts” (pesaḥ, shavu‘ot, and sukkot), the solemn, that is, sober or austere feasts (ro’sh hashshanah and yom kippur), and the lesser feasts (ḥanukkah and purim).

The differences between the three kinds of feasts are in their degree of theological density or weight. The pilgrimage feasts (the only ones that merit the appellation ḥag, “feast”) celebrate and actualize the great three-fold saving event in Israel’s history: the Exodus, the Mosaic covenant, and the entrance into the Promised Land. They are therefore the most important of all the feasts; they are called “pilgrimage” (regalim) feasts because in biblical times they were marked by a great influx of visitors to the temple in Jerusalem, the Holy City.

The “austere” feasts celebrate not the divine event but the human outcome of freedom’s failure; they recall the infidelity of human beings in response to God’s faithfulness, and they are days of great repentance and profound conversion. They are “austere” because the prevailing mood is not joy but a critical facing up to self and to God.

The lesser feasts are so-called because they are not commanded by the Torah and are concerned with secondary events of Jewish history. Though enriched with a variety of elements, chiefly folkloristic and popular, they cannot be put on the same level as the first two types that provide the structure of the Jewish liturgical year.

A feast is a sign of the divine initiative in history; it is a “word” that rescues history from its failures and allows us to glimpse luminous meaning through, and beyond, the absurdity and monotony of historical time. Some authors make a richly meaningful suggestion regarding the origin of the word feast: they say it derives from phainomai, a Greek verb meaning “to show oneself” or “to appear,” for a feast allows a new horizon of values and meanings to manifest itself, without which life and hope would become impossible. Jewish feasts have the same function as feasts everywhere, but they have a different, more explicit, and radical meaning in light of the religious experience this people has had of the God of the Exodus and the covenant.